The Compliance Certification Reports of The University of Texas at Dallas for the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools are available for your review. To access the primary document, simply follow the menu link to the CCR Navigator on the Compliance Review page (or point your browser directly to http://sacs.utdallas.edu/ccrnav).

Important Notices:

1. The entire project website is optimized for Firefox. Opera and Safari also work well with the site. Internet Explorer will give you the pages, but they may not render accurately and they will load more slowly.
2. Most documentation remains in the public domain. Some information, however, is confidential or sensitive and is restricted to people with authorized access. Documents with social security numbers, for example, are restricted.
3. The Compliance Certification Reports will remain static unless updates are required as a result of the review by external constituents assigned by the Commission.

Link to Compliance Certification Report (CCR) Navigator

Welcome to the UT Dallas SACS Project website. Here you will find material developed to support UTD’s reaffirmation of accreditation with the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

As a truly collaborative effort, the Project involved faculty, staff, students, and members of the community-at-large, all of whom continuously review how the university really functions. Teams of interested university members review everything from policy and procedures to program and course assessment.

Most of the supporting materials are public documents, and you are invited to look around, use a search box to look for something that interests you, and decide for yourself how well UT Dallas is meeting its potential.

Please note that this website will spin off into a number of websites after the reaffirmation review is completed. We'll be posting new websites for Institutional Effectiveness, Academic and Administrative Assessment, and the new QEP website—and this space will continue to provide a number of tools for internal use.

The University of Texas at Dallas began its reaffirmation process (aka self study) in early 2006 in an effort to continue its status as accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. This accreditation serves as a “gold standard” for universities—a recognition that the university meets certain criteria most often associated with effective universities that exhibit a high degree of institutional effectiveness and integrity. UTD was last reaccredited in 1998 by SACS and also holds accreditations from the AACSB, ABET, ACS, and others.

The SACS Reaffirmation Process can seem fairly simple on the surface. The specifically required submissions include a Compliance Certification for each of the Principles of Accreditation, along with documentation in support of the level of compliance, and a QEP proposal. That simplistic view of the process belies thousands of hours of intensive work. Such a view also ignores the very real importance of the process: The SACS reaffirmation process requires that an institution (UTD) examine every aspect of its operation.

This self-examination was once a relatively simple task in that prior accreditation reviews required compliance with a series of “must statements.” These were objective measures to which the answer was often a simple “yes” or “no.” The new reaffirmation process provides less objective criteria and focuses more on less specific goals of integrity, success, good educational practice, and similar ideals. As a result, the range of answers has increased from the “yes” and “no” to now include a “partial compliance” response. Within this new paradigm, supporting documentation is required to provide the degree to which compliance is actually achieved.

Within the Compliance Certification Reports (see top block above), you’ll find references to the work of the various committees. Reaffirmation of accreditation requires considerable work on the part of an institution. In UTD’s case, this process required the hands-on labor of nearly 300 committee members who reviewed and documented the policies, procedures, and processes for virtually every facet of the university’s operations.

As an interested party in the future of UTD, you are invited to peruse this website but also to read and participate in the SACS Project blog (http://sacs.utdallas.edu/blog) as a way of getting a feel for how the teams worked and what obstacles they met along the way.

Link to Southern Association of Colleges Website, Link to SACS Principles